HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

animal531

1,024 karma · joined July 27, 2015

submissionscomments
animal531··on Show HN: CUDA Fractal Renderer
Yeah, for example Unity uses C#, so you can used a managed CUDA library. If you're using a C engine like Unreal etc. its even easier since you can just include the code.

But having said that, a giant drawback to using CUDA in gaming is that the overhead of transforming and copying your data to/from CUDA kills off a lot of the performance, so while its still great its not nearly as good as writing compute shaders.

They are a topic of their own, the code can start off quite basic but with recent additions you can now also do some really advanced thread management and coordination.

They still come with big overhead to moving data around, but in general they're better suited to the use-case than CUDA.

animal531··on Programming vehicles in games
Very cool! Quite some time ago I attempted to make a helicopter sim for a gamejam, but I didn't have nearly enough time to get anything decent out of it.

Ah, the quest for more time...

animal531··on Steam, Itch.io are pulling ‘porn’ games. Critics say it's a slippery slope
That's to stop children from accessing it while this stops anyone from doing so. The two aren't equivalent.
animal531··on Why are there no good dinosaur films?
When I went to see Terminator 3 I was the only person in the theater, as a result of that I really got that end of the world and being stuck in a bunker atmosphere from the end of the movie.
animal531··on Hidden interface controls that affect usability
Youtuber/Engineer William Osman had a great rant some time back when he bought a new microwave and it came with a ton of buttons, his argument being that a microwave only really needs one (and ideally its just a dial instead of a button).

My previous one lasted more than 20 years, from when my parents bought it for me when I went to study until some time in my 40s. It was still functional, but its dial had become loose and it didn't look that great anymore.

The one I bought after that follows the new pattern, it has buttons up the wazoo and who even knows what they do? To be honest I just need one power setting with a time and maybe a defrost option?

animal531··on Biomolecular shifts occur in our 40s and 60s (2024)
Hah gentle, my vision distance also started degrading slowly but I had no issues otherwise. Text etc. was a bit blurrier but I could still read everything fine, except when it was too close to my eyes.

Then one day I pretty much hit a brick wall and went from 0 to 100% eye strain in about 2-3 days. Now I need constant eye drops, a humidifier, breaks every 20 minutes, time spent doing other things etc. to just be able to do what I did before.

animal531··on Writing toy software is a joy
Oh yeah make no mistake, he's super talented!
animal531··on Writing toy software is a joy
>An ECS framework, 1-2 weeks

That gave me a good chuckle. Yeah look, you can change your data layout to be in more of an ECS format, make some optimizations and call it a day; but in reality you're still going to be pretty far from the real thing.

I can say this because I've been working on one for some months now, of course I'm going for a production build and also to turn it into a Unity asset that's worthy of being sold, so it's going to require a lot more effort. The goal of mine is to ensure that its extremely simple to use (which Units DOTS totally fails at) while still being as efficient as possible.

Some notable things I've had to do for this project:

- I have a tool releasing on the Unity asset store (currently being vetted) that performs optimization for you, e.g. you give it a variable such as an int, a range of let's say 1..1024; then it'll automatically time your code while searching for the best sample in the range. I needed to create this for the next item, which is

- My C# Thread tool which runs managed threaded code for you. It creates no garbage so and uses the above optimizer on three different variables so as to find the best amount of threads, calls and inner loop sizes to use for your code. Because of that it can run managed code almost as fast as Burst/Jobs (whereas they use their own compiler and optimize code instead of using Mono). It can even beat Burst on small to medium workloads as long as the code inside doesn't contain some efficiency that Burst can natively fix.

- Then of course there are other things an ECS needs like pathfinding, unit collision avoidance etc. For these I have both CPU and GPU solutions since CPU only really works up to about 10k entities at a decent framerate.

So yeah, I don't recommend trying it; it's probably a total waste of time.

animal531··on From SDR to 'Fake HDR': Mario Kart World on Switch 2
I agree on the HDR blinding you, its mostly just a gimmick. Where it works is in for example Diablo 4 when there is something really shiny lying on the ground, which makes it pop out.

Other games like Senua did actually manage to pull off an amazing sun/scene though. Because its slower they can use it to accentuate, for example you walk around a corner and go from the darkness into full on sunlight which is blinding, but then falls off so as to become bearable.

animal531··on WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
Where I live using tools such as Truecaller isn't really an option, and just that by itself probably slows my budget phone down by 15%.

I don't know if it'll manage with another 15% loss.

animal531··on Me an' Algernon – grappling with (temporary) cognitive decline
When I was 20 I could come up with an idea and just sit and my computer and code it over however many hours without experiencing any issues.

If I was reading a book as a teen my eyes would eventually get a little fuzzy, but we're talking margins here.

Now I'm close to 50 and a confluence of things have hit me. I figured out that I have a crippling case of ADD (who knew?) and the medication has been amazing. I really want to code more and have so many ideas and things I want (and financially speaking need) to work on, but my eyes are taking a tremendous amount of strain, so in the end a whole portion of the gains feels as if they're being wasted.

The old brain is at least still firing, when that begins to go I'm not sure what I'm going to have left.

animal531··on Helion: A modern fast paced Doom FPS engine in C#
I posted further down about Bepu Physics v2: https://github.com/bepu/bepuphysics2

It heavily uses numerics and the performance is amazing.

animal531··on Helion: A modern fast paced Doom FPS engine in C#
Go and have a look at Bepu Physics v2: https://github.com/bepu/bepuphysics2

It can be quite performant these days, sadly I'm stuck developing in Unity Mono C# which is quite a bit behind.

animal531··on Rendering Crispy Text on the GPU
I find it amazing how many people are working and/or playing with text rendering at the moment. I work in Unity and have also been dipping my toes, but trying to think of doing some modern enhancements to the whole thing.

The Unity solution is quite limiting, someone about 10 years ago made a great asset and was actively developing it, but then they bought it and integrated it into their subsystem, after that all development basically stopped. Now in modern times a lot of games are using Slug, and it renders some really beautiful text, but unfortunately they are doing large scale licensing to big companies only.

Some thoughts I've come up with: 1. Creating text is basically a case of texture synthesis. We used to just throw it into textures and let the GPU handle it, but obviously its a general purpose device and not meant to know what information (such as edges) are more important than others. Even a 2k texture of a letter doesn't look 100% when you view it at full screen size.

2. Edge Lines: I have a little business card here from my Doctor's office. At e.g. 20-30cm normal human reading distance the text on it looks great, but zooming in close you can see a lot of differences. The card material isn't anywhere close to flat and the edge lines are really all over the place, in all kinds of interesting ways.

3. Filling: The same happens for the center filled part of a letter or vector, when you zoom in you can see a lot of flaws creep in, e.g. 5% of the visible layer has some or the other color flaw. There are black flecks on the white card, white/black flecks in a little apple logo they have etc.

4. So basically I want to add a distance parameter as well as using size. Both these cases for just rendering normal 2d text is relatively irrelevant, but in 3d people will often go stand right up against something, so the extra detailing will add a lot. For the synthesis part, there's no reason that any of the lines should be a solid fill instead of for example some artistic brush stroke, or using some derivative noise curves to create extra/stable information/detailing.

5. Another thing to look at might be work subdivision. Instead of rendering a whole set of letters in N time, if the camera is relatively stable we can refine those over successive frames to improve detailing, for example go from 2 to M subdivisions per curve.

6. There are numerous available examples such as the following concurrent B-Tree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ce-XC4MtWk In their demo they fly into e.g. a planetary body and keep subdividing the visible terrain on-screen to some minimum size; then they can synthesize extra coherent detailing that matches that zoom level from some map, in their case e.g. noise for the moon, or code for water etc.

I find that a lot of the people working on text are sort of doing their own thing data structure wise, instead of looking at these already implemented and proven concurrent solutions. Here is another interesting paper, DLHT: A Non-blocking Resizable Hashtable with Fast Deletes and Memory-awareness / https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09986

Not to say that those are the way to parallelize the work, or even if that is necessary, but it might be an interesting area where one can increase detailing.

animal531··on Rendering Crispy Text on the GPU
That's true, but in this case one can cache the output of e.g. a rendered letter and re-use that, without the intermediate SDF etc. steps.

Of course for e.g. games that breaks if the font size changes, letters rotate and/or become skewed etc.

animal531··on The first big AI disaster is yet to happen
I'd be fairly certain at this point that someone has used LLM created code in something that has subsequently caused a death.
animal531··on I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic
I don't really think that it has to be a struggle. For example if you started hobby A (which could be an easy thing) then you'd meet other people doing the hobby and could bond over your shared interest etc. But having said that, difficult things will always bond people faster and better, especially if it turns the dynamic into an us vs them situation.

I find that really outgoing people do great with any situation such as e.g. a dinner, but the truth is they do great because they don't need the shared interest. If we were kids and a really outgoing kid showed up they could just hang out with us without having the slightest interest in our games, simply because they were fun to be around.

Personally the kid analogy works quite well to help me understand the dynamics, and sadly what we lose as adults is the ability to walk up to any other person and go "oh is that an abc", and then just joining them AND to be accepted for having done so.

animal531··on The radix 2^51 trick (2017)
CPU's are really funny and interesting things. Us programmers work with them daily and make so many assumptions about them, as well as the whole code chain from the compiler, runtimes, how code works when it comes to loops, methods etc., you name it.

I've been working on my own Entity Component System in C# and basically had to start from the ground up and test every assumption possible. There have only really been a few instances where my gut was correct, more often than not there are so many surprising gotchas hidden everywhere.

animal531··on Visual Studio Code: Text Buffer Reimplementation (2018)
Sadly I think plain old Visual Studio isn't getting much love these days.

At least Rider exist, so if they fall too far behind that will just keep growing in market share.

animal531··on Show HN: Genetic Boids Web Simulation
I quite like Boids, but recently I started playing with RVO2 ORCA (optimal reciprocal collision avoidance). I made some changes to it and moved it to a compute shader to make this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BavnPOPcHlk

The entities in the video are running super fast for testing purposes, so usually they'd be going a lot slower. They can produce some really pleasing patterns as they move through each other etc.

On the downside its quite expensive vs Boids, for example the video is from a slightly older version and every agent is looking at the closest 32 neighbours + 32 obstacles to compute its own velocity. At high densities you can drop that to e.g. 4 neighbours without appreciable difference, which allows for running e.g. 32k entities at 120fps.

animal531··on Sierpiński Triangle? In My Bitwise and?
Nothing much to do with your great post, but I almost REALLY liked that first pyramid, but the last line being off threw me visually, so I had to straighten it out:

                                    1
                                  1   1
                                1   0   1
                              1   1   1   1
                            1   0   0   0   1
                          1   1   0   0   1   1
                        1   0   1   0   1   0   1
                      1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1
                    1   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   1
                  1   1   0   0   0   0   0   0   1   1
                1   0   1   0   0   0   0   0   1   0   1
              1   1   1   1   0   0   0   0   1   1   1   1
            1   0   0   0   1   0   0   0   1   0   0   0   1
          1   1   0   0   1   1   0   0   1   1   0   0   1   1
        1   0   1   0   1   0   1   0   1   0   1   0   1   0   1
      1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1
    1   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   1
  1   1   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   1   1
animal531··on A simple 16x16 dot animation from simple math rules
Weeee: https://tixy.land/?code=sin%28x%29*cos%28y%29%2Bcos%28x%29*s...

White blood cells attack: https://tixy.land/?code=sin%28x%2Bt%29%2Fcos%28y%2Bi%29%2Bco...

animal531··on Metagenomics test saves woman's sight after mystery infection
I've started taking supplements to see if I can help the problem. Basically I'm now adding and removing a bit of everything that can help with or make the problem worse, but I'm only a day or three into that.

I'll check out the ones you mention.

animal531··on Metagenomics test saves woman's sight after mystery infection
Yeah I got some reading/computer glasses and today installed a monitor arm so I can more easily control the distance, no luck with it as of yet.
animal531··on Metagenomics test saves woman's sight after mystery infection
I'm currently struggling with my eyes. Over time my near vision started degrading as I'm approaching 50, then I hit that wall where it suddenly became a lot worse and I got glasses for the first time.

But the problem is that it generates a ton of eye strain for some reason, so now I'm on eye drops probably every 30 to 45 minutes and if I don't take them my eyes become really sore and useless.

At least I'm working for myself so its less of a hassle, but taking constant breaks to rest the eyes isn't great for productivity.

animal531··on Qwen3: Think deeper, act faster
They all are using these tests to determine their worth, but to be honest they don't convert well to real world tests.

For example I tried Deepseek for code daily over a period of about two months (vs having used ChatGPT before), and its output was terrible. It would produce code with bugs, break existing code when making additions, totally fail at understanding what you're asking etc.

animal531··on How long does it take to create a new habit? (2015)
ADHD: I can form a new habit in two or so days, but I can also lose a habit I've been doing for years within a very short time.
animal531··on Olympic Gold Medalist Dominates the 100M at Her Kid's Sports Day Event
Another take on it came from my time playing StarCraft 2. When the game was in full swing you could probably break it into 10 levels where anyone from the previous level can never beat someone in the next bracket.

When two of my friends started playing I could pretty easily beat both of them while they were playing together with any race setup, BUT at the same time it would have taken 3-5 of myself to even have the slightest chance against a professional level player.

animal531··on Show HN: Undercutf1 – F1 Live Timing TUI with Driver Tracker, Variable Delay
A question for the gamers out there. Why doesn't F1 for example have a mode where you and others can race alongside the real life racers?
animal531··on The path to open-sourcing the DeepSeek inference engine
I spent the last two or so months using it as an assistant for code and my conclusion is that it is terrible compared to even the free model of ChatGPT.

The incidence of bugs, it not understanding what you're asking or just generating code that is straight up wrong is much worse. Even with guidance it will often be unable to fix issues, leaving you to do all the manual legwork to get things working. Usually you're better off just having done everything yourself from the start.

During those two months they really improved GPT as well, its generation speed is now much much faster, and the quality of its output has become a lot better.

← PreviousPage 4 of 29Next →